Macedonia Charges Ex-Official In Staging of Antiterror Killings

By NICHOLAS WOOD

Published: May 1, 2004

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia, April 30—
Macedonia charged its former minister of the interior on Friday with staging the killing of seven South Asian migrants two years ago, in an attempt to show the United States that the government was actively supporting the campaign against terror.

The minister, Ljube Boskovksi, was accused with three senior police commanders of ordering the murder of six Pakistanis and an Indian close to the capital, Skopje, in March 2002. Two other police officers and a businessman have also been charged.

The killings were described recently by senior Western diplomats as a crude attempt by the government to win a free hand to deal harshly with Macedonia's ethnic Albanian minority, which had won major civil rights concessions from the government after a 2001 conflict.

At the time, Mr. Boskovski said the police had foiled a plot by the National Liberation Army, an ethnic Albanian guerrilla group, to attack the American, British and German Embassies. The men had been killed, he said, when they opened fire on a police patrol.

When news of the deaths was first announced, photographs were shown of the men with pistols stuffed in their pockets.

New automatic rifles wrapped in plastic were put on display along with new uniforms marked with the insignia of the guerrilla group, all of which the police said had been found with the dead men.

Mr. Boskovski was interior minister until September 2002 when his Macedonian nationalist party was voted out of office in parliamentary elections.

Former ethnic Albanian guerrillas are now members of a coalition government with a center left Macedonian party.

Before the charges were announced, Mr. Boskovski denied he had allowed the killing of civilians.

''Before I'm taken into custody, I solemnly declare I'm telling you the truth,'' he told reporters, according to Reuters. ''I have not given any such order to eliminate such a group. There was no order to kill civilians.''